The Doctor is warned of a new threat to the Earth: the evil renegade Time
Lord known as the Master has arrived. The Master has allied himself with
the Nestene Consciousness and has once again paved the way for an Auton
presence on Earth. The Doctor and his new assistant, Jo Grant, must stop
the Nestenes for a second time -- but this time with the knowledge that
the Doctor is going head to head with a being who is quite possibly his
true equal.

Production

Because he had been appointed producer of Doctor Who late in the
planning stages for the programme's seventh season, Barry Letts' influence
on that set of stories was minimal. The opportunity to really make his
mark finally came in late February 1970, when Letts learned that Doctor
Who was to continue into Season Eight. Letts thereafter made four
major decisions which would affect the series both on-screen and off.

First, having secured a larger budget for Season Eight, Letts was able to
schedule it as a collection of five stories, one more than in Season
Seven. This meant that Letts could avoid the lengthy seven-part serials
which were predominant in the seventh season; the longest story of new
year would be only six episodes long. In this manner, Letts was able to
ensure that there would be more “first nights” during Season
Eight, which he and Head of Serials Ronnie Marsh felt would be better from
a ratings perspective.

In place of Liz, Barry Letts elected to introduce new male
and female characters, inspired by companions Jamie and Victoria

Second, Letts decided that the altered recording schedule with which he
had experimented on both The Silurians and
Inferno during Season Seven would now become
the norm. Instead of taping one episode each week, two episodes would now
be recorded together every fortnight, thereby reducing wear and tear on
sets (a set which was needed for every installment of a six-part story
would now only have to be erected and taken down three times, rather than
half a dozen).

Third, Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks decided that the Doctor's
Season Seven companion, Liz Shaw, would not return to the programme. Letts
felt that Liz was too intelligent and independent to play second fiddle to
the Doctor, and wanted to soften the rather sterile UNIT environment.
Instead, Letts elected to introduce new male and female characters,
inspired by the companion team of Jamie and Victoria who had featured in
the series when Letts had directed The Enemy Of The
World two and a half years earlier. The Doctor's new assistant
would be Josephine (Jo) Grant, envisioned as being more charming but less
science-oriented than Liz. Her male counterpart, with whom there would be
the possibility of romantic involvement, would be UNIT Captain Mike Yates;
Yates would also act as the Brigadier's second-in-command.

Finally, Letts and Dicks agreed that Season Eight should feature some sort
of gimmick to attract new viewers. With the exiled Doctor acting as a sort
of latter-day Sherlock Holmes, they thought it would be appropriate to
introduce an archnemesis in the vein of Holmes' Professor Moriarty. This
new villain, whom Letts and Dicks hoped would replace the Daleks at the
forefront of Doctor Who's rogues gallery, would be a renegade Time
Lord like the Doctor, but with a much more evil bent. Dicks would
subsequently christen the character “the Master” as a sinister
spin on the Doctor's own peculiar appellation.

With the fundamentals of Season Eight now defined, the next priority for
the production team was to secure their cast for the new year. To this
end, Jon Pertwee was quickly contracted on March 9th. Letts had created
the Master with Roger Delgado in mind, and the actor agreed to appear
throughout Season Eight on March 23rd. Delgado -- whose full name was
Roger Caesar Marius Bernard de Delgado Torres Castillo Roberto -- had left
a bank job to work on stage. He soon parlayed his exotic appearance into a
number of film and television roles; these included Quatermass II
and Sir Francis Drake, the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope movie The Road
To Hong Kong, and Hammer horror fare such as The Mummy's
Shroud.

Katy Manning was late to her audition for the role of Jo,
and was unable to read her script as she had forgotten her glasses

Next to commit to Season Eight was Nicholas Courtney, on April 8th. Two
months later, on June 22nd, John Levene agreed to appear in 18 episodes as
Sergeant Benton. Shortly thereafter, auditions began for the roles of Jo
and Mike. For the former, about fifty actresses were interviewed. Three
performers -- all of whom wanted to play Jo in the vein of the female
protagonists of The Avengers -- had already been shortlisted before
Katy Manning was one of the last to appear before Letts. Manning had some
television credits to her name, including an episode of Softly, Softly:
Task Force. She had also been offered a contract by MGM in Hollywood,
but had acquiesced to the wishes of her father and remained in England.
Manning was late to the audition and was unable to read her script as she
had forgotten her glasses, necessary due to her extreme shortsightedness.
Nonetheless, she was offered the part the next day. Pertwee concurred with
Letts' decision: he had met Manning at the BBC some months earlier and
felt then that she was suitable for Doctor Who.

Meanwhile, Letts' first choice to play Mike Yates was actor Ian Marter. It
soon became clear, however, that Marter would not be able to commit to all
of Season Eight and so Letts instead hired Richard Franklin, whom the
producer had recently seen in a West End play. In addition to a variety of
theatrical work, Franklin had also appeared in programmes such as
Crossroads and Dixon Of Dock Green. Marter, meanwhile, would
eventually be cast as companion Harry Sullivan four years later. Franklin
was contracted for all five serials on July 1st. Manning's contract was
signed on the 3rd, guaranteeing her appearance in at least twenty
episodes.

To write the new characters' debut serial, Dicks had turned to Robert
Holmes. Dicks had been very pleased with Holmes' Spearhead From Space, which had led off Season
Seven, and asked him to pen a return appearance for that adventure's
monsters, the Autons, and their plastic-controlling masters, the Nestene
Consciousness. Holmes disliked reusing old creations, preferring to come
up with original concepts for each new story, but ultimately consented. A
storyline entitled “The Spray Of Death” was commissioned on
April 28th.

Terrance Dicks suggested the sequence of Jo setting off
the booby trap, in order to make her more prominent in episode one

Several modifications were made to Holmes' original breakdown. Wanting to
make Jo's role in the first episode more prominent, Dicks suggested the
sequence where she discovers the Master operating out of Farrel's factory
and subsequently sets off the booby trap on the box due to the evil Time
Lord's post-hypnotic suggestion; originally, the bomb had simply gone off
when the Doctor tried to open the box by remote control. The elder
Farrel's immunity to hypnotism -- justifying the Master's decision to have
him killed -- was Dicks' idea as well. The script editor also added
dialogue explaining that Liz Shaw had returned to Cambridge. Initially,
the troll dolls played a much greater role in the story's climax, and
explained the Master's interest in the circus, which would have been
used to distribute the toys. The victim of the Master's murderous phone
cord was another alteration: initially, this would have been the
Brigadier rather than the Doctor, strangled as he tries to alert the
police to the true nature of the troll dolls.

More significant was Dicks' dislike of the way Holmes had originally
planned to instigate the Auton invasion. Holmes had written that the
daffodils (and the troll dolls) would be animated when the temperature
reached a certain level -- a level which would be obtained thanks to a
fortuitous oncoming heat wave in Britain. Feeling that this made the
story's setting illogical -- it would make more sense for the Master to
carry out his plan in a tropical locale -- it was decided to replace
this with a broadcast activation signal. The attempted arrival on Earth
of a Nestene energy form was also added to part four at this point. The
scripts for “The Spray Of Death” were commissioned on June
12th.

In addition to his role as producer of Doctor Who, Letts was keen
to direct the occasional serial -- a job which he had most recently
undertaken on an emergency basis for part of Inferno at the end of the seventh recording
block. Since “The Spray Of Death” came at the start of the new
season, Letts decided to helm Serial EEE himself.

Franklin joined the cast for the start of location work on September 17th,
when several scenes were completed, mostly in Buckinghamshire. These
included the Daffodil Men handing out the plastic flowers at St Peter's
Court and a parking lot in Chalfont St Peter, and various roadside
sequences in Hodgemoor Woods near Chalfont St Giles. The day concluded
back in London with the explosion of the booby-trapped box at Queen's
Wharf in Hammersmith. Manning and Delgado's first day of work was
September 18th, which was spent at the Roberts Brothers Circus. Erected in
Leyton, London, this doubled for the Rossini Brothers International
Circus.

After twisting her ankle on location, Katy Manning became
concerned that she might be fired

Production resumed after the weekend on the 21st, when the scenes of the
Doctor and Jo being pursued by Autons were filmed in a quarry owned by the
Totterhoe Lime and Stone Company Ltd near Dunstable, Bedfordshire; this
material had originally been written for a woodland environment. Manning,
who had to play Jo without wearing her glasses, twisted her ankle on this
day. The actress -- already nervous about being the junior member of the
regular cast, and provoked by jokes made by production assistant Nicholas
Howard John (the brother of Caroline John, who had played Liz Shaw) --
became concerned that she might be fired. Pertwee came to his costar's
defence, however, rebuking John's comments. Manning was taken to hospital
to have her ankle examined, but returned to work shortly thereafter.
Another castmember in ill health at this time was Courtney, who was
enduring a sudden bout of depression. Courtney's state was noted by both
Pertwee and Letts, and the producer/director elected to excuse him from
most filming that day.

Courtney continued to be absent the following day, which saw the start of
filming on Beacon Hill material. The GPO Relay Station tower at nearby
Caddington posed as the research establishment. A double stood in for
Courtney, and most of the Brigadier's dialogue in the relevant scenes was
deleted or reassigned. Letts also inserted the scene where Jo twists her
ankle to explain the limp Manning now suffered following her accident the
day before. Another last-minute change was to have the faux Master shot at
the story's conclusion revealed to be a hypnotised Farrel; as scripted, an
Auton played the decoy.

The Beacon Hill sequences were completed on the 23rd, after which location
work concluded at Thermo Plastics Ltd back in Dunstable; this served as
Farrel's factory. Courtney rejoined the team, although Letts agreed to
reduce his dialogue to make the work less stressful for him. On the 24th,
Katy Manning was introduced to the press as the Doctor's newest companion.
At around the same time, it was decided to amend the serial's title to
Terror Of The Autons.

The first block of studio recordings took place on Friday, October 9th and
Saturday the 10th at BBC Television Centre Studio 8. The first day was
used for special effects sequences, notably those involving the animated
troll doll and Goodge's miniaturised corpse. The second day saw the
completion of most of the remainder of episodes one and two.

At a late stage, the scene where the Master animates an
Auton was added to part one to justify the story's title

During rehearsals for the second studio block, the scripts underwent two
significant amendments. First, Dicks realised that the story's new title
meant that an Auton needed to appear somewhere in part one, inspiring the
inclusion of the scene where the Master animates an Auton. Meanwhile,
Ronnie Marsh had objected to the Doctor's final line about the Master, in
which he avows that the Master will stay on Earth “until I destroy
him. Or until he destroys me”. Instead, the Doctor would suggest
that he was looking forward to their next contretemps.

The second block occurred exactly two weeks after the first, on October
23rd and 24th; this time, however, the venue was TC6. The Friday was
largely used for shots requiring the time-consuming Colour Separation
Overlay effect, while Saturday saw the rest of parts three and four
recorded. Meanwhile, Doctor Who now had access to far more advanced
editing facilities than had previously been the case. This enabled Letts
to tailor each episode much more to his liking than would otherwise have
been possible, and resulted in significantly more editing of scenes than
in the past. The first product of this electronic surgery, Terror Of
The Autons part one, was broadcast on January 2nd, 1971, signalling
the start of Doctor Who's eighth season.

Sources

Doctor Who: The Handbook: The Third Doctor by David J Howe and
Stephen James Walker (1996), Virgin Publishing, ISBN 0 426 20486 7.